What you should know about upsets. 81 simple facts that will change how you view the world.
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How did @Tequilla get access to your account?
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I thought this was some copypasta until like paragraph four.
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You actually read it?HillsboroDuck said:I thought this was some copypasta until like paragraph four.
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Oh shit woosh on me. I definitely thought it was some doogpound copypasta.HillsboroDuck said:I thought this was some copypasta until like paragraph four.
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Well, for a more reasoned response after actually reading the wall of text @Mad_Son, I'll be the first one to preach that there's a lot of variance and uncontrolled variables in football which lead to lots of wacky outcomes when it comes to head-to-head. You are essentially pitting four averages with high variance against one another, PPG & PPGA for both teams. Unsurprisingly, these numbers can have a range of outcomes that can look vastly different. A game is a weighted coin toss and that's why it's better to think of outcomes in terms of percentages or X out of 10 than as a pure binary W or L.
As much as head to head wins have a really high variance your overall record should, more or less, be a solid indicator of who you are as a team across a season. As you said, body of work.
law of av·er·ag·es
noun
the principle that supposes most future events are likely to balance any past deviation from a presumed average.
All that said, (Jake browning sucks BUT) I think this year's losses are pretty squarely on the failings of the coaches and not some other outside variables or outliers. Namely, recruiting, game plans, and in game decisions. The fact that our losses were so close are, to me, part of what's so damning. This team is just not that good. Hopefully, with some luck, it can be good enough to win a shitty Pac12 and with some extreme luck win a shitty Rosebowl. At this point though, I am of the opinion that that is more bargaining stage of grief and denial with hope than a likely outcome.
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I can't read hebrew
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Right to leftPitchfork51 said:I can't read hebrew
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Same here. I was looking for some telltale Doogism.HillsboroDuck said:I thought this was some copypasta until like paragraph four.
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I think the key here is that while there will be some distribution of outcomes based on uncontrolled variables, the points scored and points allowed are not independent variables in a head to head match up. How much one team scores is partially based on how good that team is at offense as well as how good the other team is at defense (as well as myriad other non-primary ordinal effects which introduce extra variance). A game decided by one score could be a good team having a bad day on its distribution of possible outcomes vs a bad team's good day in its distribution, it could be two comparably matched teams having comparable places on their results distributions, etc. To have a bad team blow out a good team and win by 4 scores would likely be multiple standard deviations out of the expected range of outcomes and the data supports the notion that a blowout indicates the better team won.UW_Doog_Bot said:Well, for a more reasoned response after actually reading the wall of text @Mad_Son, I'll be the first one to preach that there's a lot of variance and uncontrolled variables in football which lead to lots of wacky outcomes when it comes to head-to-head. You are essentially pitting four averages with high variance against one another, PPG & PPGA for both teams. Unsurprisingly, these numbers can have a range of outcomes that can look vastly different. A game is a weighted coin toss and that's why it's better to think of outcomes in terms of percentages or X out of 10 than as a pure binary W or L.
As much as head to head wins have a really high variance your overall record should, more or less, be a solid indicator of who you are as a team across a season. As you said, body of work.
law of av·er·ag·es
noun
the principle that supposes most future events are likely to balance any past deviation from a presumed average.
All that said, (Jake browning sucks BUT) I think this year's losses are pretty squarely on the failings of the coaches and not some other outside variables or outliers. Namely, recruiting, game plans, and in game decisions. The fact that our losses were so close are, to me, part of what's so damning. This team is just not that good. Hopefully, with some luck, it can be good enough to win a shitty Pac12 and with some extreme luck win a shitty Rosebowl. At this point though, I am of the opinion that that is more bargaining stage of grief and denial with hope than a likely outcome.
Since we don't play a series like in baseball where we get to do multiple weighted coin flips, we can use extra information that we have (score) to infer more about the relative statures of the teams. I would trust the overall record to the law of averages for n >> 12. Given that one 80/20 outcome coming up 20 can represents 8% of a total body of work I think it is worth understanding what score differentials tell us beyond binary win-loss.
